Consensus on HE role in ‘Building Sustainable Futures’

A consensus statement on higher education’s role in “Building Sustainable Futures”, has been approved by the some 65 participants in the Global Higher Education Symposium 2026 (GHES) held on the sidelines of the High-Level Political Forum 2026 on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

The HLPF is the central United Nations platform for the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The GHES statement amounts to a manifesto that puts universities at the heart of furthering progress on fulfilling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established for 2030 and for the successors to the 2030 goals that will be set soon.

Singled out by Charles Hopkins, the UNESCO chair in reorienting education towards sustainability, as the “key enabler of all SDGs”, universities have been active both on their campuses and through research in facilitating progress towards the 2030 SDG goals.

Influential among this group is Hopkins’ own York University (YU, Toronto, Canada), which serves as the home of the United Nations Academic Impact Hub Chair for SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities as well.

However, as Aleksandra Saša Gorišek, head of the Civil Society and Academic Impact Section in the UN’s Department of Global Communications, told University World News, while different UN agencies would engage with universities “in specific cases”, they haven’t “engaged with them in a systematic way” on SDGs.

The GHES meeting was held under Chatham House Rules, but Hopkins, Gorišek and others at the meeting agreed to be interviewed by University World News to discuss the outcomes.

The GHES was first convened in 2025 by higher education and science networks, including the International Association of Universities (IAU), the Sustainability Development Solutions Network, alongside UN entities, such as UNESCO and UN Academic Impact.

At that meeting, “they discussed what exactly it is that they can do, how they could best contribute to the work that the United Nations does. They came up with a draft consensus statement and over the past year there have been meetings with several collaborating partners and in wider consultation within their own networks,” Gorišek noted.

“Altogether, we came up with this final consensus statement that we launched [on Monday],” she said.

Sketching the HE eco-system

The statement, “Building Sustainable Futures: A Consensus Statement of the Unique Position of HE in Pursuing Solutions” (Statement) agreed to by some 65 participants, including officials from the UN, UNESCO, the Universities, the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (a UN partnership), the IAU, YU, as well as business and other institutions, begins by sketching the eco-system that colleges and universities around the world now live in.

“Around the world, higher education institutions are navigating a period of profound disruption and possibility. They are being called upon to address increasingly complex global challenges while also confronting declining public trust in science and expertise, threats to academic freedom, widening inequalities, and persistent gaps between research, policy, and practice. Yet these pressures also underscore why higher education is more essential than ever,” it states.

The Statement addresses why universities are uniquely positioned to counter the polycrises in a subsection titled, “Democratic Values, Trust and Responsibility”.

It says: “In order to fulfil their societal responsibility to benefit the common good, higher education can provide trustworthy information in times of uncertainty and can support the rebuilding of public trust while defending the authority of knowledge.”

Despite the decline in trust in universities in some countries, including a precipitous decline in the United States, that “worldwide, universities remain among the most trusted institutions in society”, Gorišek said.

“The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer has found that education has the highest trust globally. It’s at 73% and scientists have the highest trust rating: 76%.”

For his part, former ambassador David Donoghue – Ireland’s permanent representative to the UN from 2013 to 2017 – who was co-chair of the committee that first formulated the SDG 2030 agenda and chair of the group of 193 countries that finalised the SDG 2030 – contrasted universities that inspire trust with the “difficult geopolitical situation at the moment, in which trust is in short supply.

“Universities are seen as institutions which are better equipped than most to inspire trust or transmit trust. If they are independent and are conveying, disseminating reliable information and knowledge, in that sense they are a repository of reliable data and therefore trust is inspired by their work,” said Donoghue, who also attended the GHES meeting.

‘Fostering inclusive education’

Trust, the Statement says, involves “safeguard[ing] the rights, interests, physical and mental health of youth [and] fostering inclusive education.” Such inclusive education is the subject of the Statement’s next section, “Knowledge, Inclusion and Decolonisation.”

According to Hilligje van’t Land, secretary-general of the IAU, “education, quality research for the many, for the global common good” requires a fundamental rethinking of the epistemic nature of knowledge. Rather than there being “one world vision that is shared around the world” universities have to develop “more inclusive, different approaches to reality”.

Though she did not use the terms “Western science” or “Western epistemology,” she certainly referenced them when she continued: “We need to look at knowledge that comes from all five continents and within the different continents, from the different groups in the population.”

She referred to this as bringing “pluralism” into the university, in contrast to a “reductionist view of the world”.

Van’t Land is a realist and admits that doing this “is cumbersome at times. It’s time consuming. It’s at times also difficult and painful because you have to question the ways in which we stand in the world and how we can accept that other world views may be more important than [those of] ourselves.”

In our interview, the word “decolonisation” had a very specific meaning or, perhaps better, Van’t Land used it to describe a specific university activity. Decolonisation occurs when universities “problematise” situations (such as water usage) “using knowledge systems from Indigenous knowledge and knowledge from all the continents.”

By way of example, Van’t Land pointed to the IAU, which requires that in their various projects, universities document the applicable practices from around the world, including community visions to ensure that there are different voices around the table. “That’s not always mainstream,” she told University World News, but that is certainly what we promote and what this consensus statement is championing.”

Incorporating ethical teaching

Incorporating the SDGs into the curriculum is more than an exercise in curriculum revision, explained Yash Tadimalla, a representative of the UN Major Group for Children and Youth, who leads the group that focuses on children and youth, youth science interface.

Acknowledging the limited time available in the curriculum, he took a page from the decision to incorporate ethical teaching into the curriculum several years ago and suggested that SDGs could, as ethics is, be taught within case studies in a transdisciplinary way.

A nurse practitioner programme could determine which of the 17 SDGs apply and how they connect to being in the nursing profession, “whether it be providing service, managing equipment, health, public health or information sharing.” An engineering programme could incorporate the sustainability of materials, sustainability in design, post-use development, recycling and other things.

Gorišek provided an international example from De Montfort University (DMU, Leicester, UK) that exemplifies the goals of the UN Academic Impact Initiative, which includes sharing best practices on curriculum, research done at one of the universities and outreach among the 1,900 institutions that are part of the initiative.

DMU is a UN Academic Impact’s global hub for SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. One of DMU’s fashion students. “…went to Tanzania and worked with a local civil society group, an NGO that empowers women and helps them with microfinancing.”

She ran a series of workshops teaching local women how to make very simple shoes that would be worn in their community. She also taught them how to develop a business plan. “Now,” said Gorišek, these women have established a small business that they run together at the community centre.”

Under the heading of “Integration of Sustainability and SDGs,” the Statement also calls for universities to become “living labs,” a phrase Hopkins elucidated by noting that universities like his are like small cities.

“We know exactly how much water we use, how much energy we use and so on. So, from the operations point-of-view, there’s tremendous research our engineering faculty is doing on our own campus – coming up with different ways of experimenting, including putting in solar parking.”

Other examples of universities as living labs, Van’t Land said, involved deconstructing the town/gown distinction maintained by the traditional walled campus. The University of Cork (Ireland) cut a hole in an historic wall so that people could walk through the previously closed campus in order to get to the new hospital that was built on the campus.

This was done, Van’t Land said, “so that people would understand that the university is not ‘out there,’ something elitist but is there for them.” First generation Irish citizens, she said, might now say, “Oh, okay, maybe my kids can go to this university as well.”

The University of Utrecht took a different approach: putting different buildings all throughout the city. This, Van’t Land explained, “brought the whole city on board with the SDGs”.

Transdisciplinarity is important

The section titled “Systemic Change in Governance and Funding” calls for universities to “advocate to shift funding and institutional structures from competitive and fragmented models toward transdisciplinary, integration, collaboration and research that delivers societally relevant outcomes.”

On the question of transdisciplinarity, Van’t Land pointed out that the existing competitive funding model used by most universities has numerous decision points.

Why is transdisciplinarity – which is fundamental to the new education the Statement imagines because it connects different social systems, science systems and the humanities “in order to make sense of the world in which we live” – not included, she asked rhetorically.

Summarising how funding was discussed at the meetings over the past two years, Hopkins said the Statement’s reference to funding “is about the importance of all governments [committing] to fund their higher education systems well.

If they all do so together, they can make a difference in the world. If your higher education system is not well-funded, you cannot ensure that you have the proper staff conditions to work, to teach and learn and to do research and to engage with your communities.”

For her part, Van’t Land added that “too many countries have governments that let go of their higher education systems, allowing enhanced and increased privatisation of the system – and thus letting go of the capacity of a system to create the grounds and basis for better societies altogether.

“If you decide that higher education is elitist and you don’t need to support it, then you don’t support the most important leg of your whole society to develop a better world.”

Later in my interview with Van’t Land and Hopkins, when I asked about what “political hindrance” they thought was among the most pernicious, Hopkins pointed to the idea of “employability” as being the desiderata of higher education, as it is often said to be by politicians in Canada and many other countries.

Using the powerful phrase “commodification of higher education,” Van’t Land critiqued the same phenomenon.

“This transactional approach to education as a whole,” she likens to a “McDonald approach of you take a bit of this, a bit of that, and then you just create something [for example, micro-credentials] that will get you a job. But beyond the job, you also want to be a citizen,” she said.

“You cannot have a good job in the future or be equipped fully for society at the same time if you do not even have a basic understanding of the field in which you would wish to work.

“There is this hype about these new kinds of universities, ‘just in time education for the kind of job that you would need.’ Well, what a tragedy for the future, and what a sad future would that also be, because you then do not have a role in society,” she added.

‘Ethical integration’ of AI

Participants at meetings that operate under Chatham House Rules must be circumspect when speaking afterward. Hence, Van’t Land emphasised that at the meeting there was no attempt to “name and shame” any one country.

Yet, it was not too difficult to draw up a list of countries that fit what Hopkins said in answer to the question about what was meant by the first part of the first paragraph in the section on “Science, Technology, Innovation, including Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of All.”

“Higher education institutions can safeguard and validate data to support informed public decision-making and awareness, while also establishing open access, clear principles and guidelines for the intentional and ethical integration of artificial intelligence into academia.”

According to Hopkins, it’s part of what universities are, part of their mandate, “part of their culture to collect information and hold on to it so that it is embedded within how it works. So, when you have a change of a political party and something isn’t okay, and it’s erased from the websites, universities have to hold on to that data.”

Van’t Land spoke to the broader principle, noting that a government that interferes with academic freedom is, ultimately, harming its own citizens.

“Any government that is infringing on academic freedom of universities is doing itself a lot of harm because it is not allowing for free research that will lead to discovery, innovation, re-invention and moving us into the future.

“Any government, in any part of the world – and we’ve seen it on the five continents over history – sets in an infringes on these freedoms by making choices as to the words you [may] use or the disciplines you [may] teach or the people you engage or the countries you engage with, the partnerships you’re allowed to build (or not build) is detrimental to the future,” she said.

Tadimalla provided a “peak under the hood” moment when he said that there had been some debate between higher education institutions focusing on value-based education and not necessarily engaging in politics or engaging in trends of the day in order to protect value-based objective education.

“But, there were also people in the room that were talking about higher education institutions actually having to engage in politics at the local level because of [scarce] resources for education” – and how higher education institutions are often the first to be attacked or the first to be on the funding chopping block.

When Van’t Land turned to AI, she expressed great concern about it, while at the same time speaking hopefully about universities and their role in countering what she called the “restricted” nature of AI that includes “only a few voices.”

Universities are uniquely equipped to “break it open so that it doesn’t become a game played by a few, especially from the global North.” This is because universities house computer scientists and teach ethics.

“We need to ensure as well that we have a new governance [structure] and a different funding [model] that will allow for many voices. For innovation to be inclusive.

“Let’s ensure that we have good AI,” she said before adding, repeating, “AI needs to be broken up to deliver on its promise. . . to be for the global common good and for the many, including a pluralistic view of the world. We have a lot of work to do,” said Van’t Land.

‘Passing on science-based knowledge’

At the end of the interview, after saying how over the past decade he has seen universities take up and run with the challenge presented by the SDGs, Donoghue returned to the theme that universities occupy a unique niche in the ecosphere, one which is based on “passing on science-based knowledge. And that is increasingly one of the things that we absolutely need if we’re to achieve the SDGs.

“We have to have transparent science-based evidence of what works, what doesn’t – of where the needs are. Universities are a sort of motor which can help to achieve social, economic and environmental progress through science-based information,” he said.